It is almost customary to blame underutilization of the capital acquisition budget on defective planning, apathy of the civilian bureaucracy and procedural complexities. This view, however, does not take into account several factors that are external to the Ministry of Defence.

Both the government as well and the strategic community are convinced that India must not join the Australia Group without a road map for the MTCR and the NSG.

To counter the consequences flowing from growing ballistic missile proliferation in its neighbourhood, India must expand its BMD programme to include boost phase and mid-course phase intercept capability.

MoD has to assume the leadership role and provide some kind of a single-window service to the defence industry to steer the offsets in a direction that helps achieve the objective of modernisation through self-reliance.

While India has put in place a comprehensive mechanism for securing the country’s coasts, there is still a great deal to be done in terms of addressing issues relating to perceptions, resources as well as organisational management to ensure effective coastal security.

On the capital side, there may not be much of an adverse impact of reduction in allocation if the MMRCA contract gets pushed to the next year. On the revenue side, procurement of ammunition and other equipment as well as maintenance of legacy systems would be adversely affected.